Good Reads with Sarah Siegel

Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haight

It is early Sunday morning in Shanghai’s deserted financial district when a car careens around the corner and strikes Lindsey Litvak. The hit-and-run leaves the 22-year-old in a coma and her family searching for answers. Why was she living hundreds of miles from Beijing, where she told them she was teaching English? Why is the closet in her sparse apartment filled with designer dresses and high heels? As Lindsey’s divorced parents seek information and her 11-year-old sister, away at summer camp, awaits word from the hospital, layers of family history are revealed in this engrossing novel. Before Lindsey dropped out of college and moved to China, where the Litvaks had gone to adopt her sister years earlier, she had a teenage affair with a married man. That relationship and its sudden end are at the core of the secrets threatening to tear this family apart. Capturing both the possibilities of reinvention and the scars carried from a traumatic past, Haigh's (Mercy Street, 2022) searing novel examines the interplay between choice and chance. -- Bridget Thoreson (Reviewed 3/1/2025)